McAfee Predicts More Malware Will Target Smart Homes In 2019

The conveniences offered up by smart home devices like smart bulbs, thermostats, locks, and more are too good to pass up. After all who wouldn’t relish the idea of a home adapting to our needs, our lights turning on automatically when needed, temperatures adjusted dynamically to offer the most comfort, and fridges that reminds us and even help us order food when we’re out.

However before you start buying “smart” everything, anti-virus software maker McAfee seems to believe that come 2019, we might start to see more sophisticated malware that targets smart homes, which according to them, is expected to largely come through our mobile devices that are used to control our smart gadgets.

According to the company, “Malware authors will take advantage of phones and tablets, those already trusted controllers, to try to take over IoT devices by password cracking and exploiting vulnerabilities. These attacks will not appear suspicious because the network traffic comes from a trusted device. The success rate of attacks will increase, and the attack routes will be difficult to identify.”

In the past there have been security vulnerabilities discovered in smart devices, namely because they tend to use different methods of security. In the meantime as TechRadar notes, it might be a good idea to keep your IoT devices on a separate network to help isolate them in the event that something goes wrong.